Streamers, say goodbye to hours of post-stream editing because Streamlabs’ new AI Game Highlighter automatically identifies and compiles the most engaging moments from your live streams. 

For newcomers struggling to gain traction on Twitch, the AI Game Highlighter offers a fresh perspective on streaming achievement. The tool, coming this fall, will support Fortnite, with more titles coming in the near future. 

“Two primary motivations are driving the product – one is to help users grow their channels by repurposing their content, and the second is reframing what success feels like for a new streamer,” explains Streamlabs head Ashray Urs. 

The tool transforms live streams into opportunities to create evergreen content ready to be shared on YouTube, TikTok, and beyond.

It also seeks to provide a sense of accomplishment for new streamers who may not immediately attract a large audience.

“The idea is that a new streamer who doesn’t get a lot of viewers immediately can still make progress and still have a really rewarding first stream,” Ashray shares.

Streamlabs has meticulously designed the tool to preserve each creator’s unique brand and style, ensuring that automation doesn’t mean losing personality.

In light of the launch, Ashray breaks down the technology behind the AI Game Highlighter, its integration with existing workflows, and Streamlabs’ plans for expanding its capabilities across different games and platforms.

How AI Game Highlighter Works

The AI Game Highlighter employs advanced technology to identify key moments during live streams, offering content creators an efficient way to repurpose their broadcasts.

The system analyzes game-related events, including “eliminations, knockdowns, shield drops, gunshots,” emotional cues, and microphone activity. The AI utilizes multiple machine learning models to detect significant events. 

Ashray elaborates, “We’re using voice detection to try to see when someone’s talking, analyzing game audio to see when someone’s shooting, using OCR to identify text, and using computer vision to identify when you’re in the game.”

Regarding accuracy, Ashray confidently states, “We’re nearly 100% accurate on capturing all the eliminations that happen in Fortnite.” 

However, he acknowledges that determining overall highlight quality can be more subjective. “We’re trying a lot to figure out what that balance is between some of the emotional cues and some of the in-game events,” Ashray explains.

Streamlabs is currently focusing on perfecting the highlighting experience for one game, with plans to continually improve the balance between game events and emotional cues. 

“Our goal has always been to create the absolute best sort of game-highlighting experience possible,” Ashray points out.

Efficiency Meets Discovery

Streamlabs’ new tool addresses key challenges in traditional video editing, offering a streamlined process that significantly reduces the time and effort required to produce highlight reels.

Ashray highlights its efficiency: “We’re automatically pulling together the most interesting clips so that it’s simple and streamlined to just upload to YouTube. It takes something that might take several hours, and you can complete it in seconds.”

The AI Game Highlighter’s ability to automate the most time-consuming aspects of video editing is particularly valuable for streamers who may be exhausted after a broadcast. 

“The last thing you might want to do after a stream where you’re putting a lot of energy into the gaming, into engaging with your audience, is sit down and spend hours reviewing everything and editing and compiling a video,” Ashray explains.

He highlights the tool’s potential to boost creators’ discoverability, a critical factor in today’s converging media, stating that it’s “super important that you’re maximizing how you get discovered and build that audience.”

Streamlabs has leveraged its expertise in cross-platform integration to ensure seamless export across various social media platforms and create the “best user experience possible.”

As for future developments, Streamlabs plans to expand the tool’s capabilities, including introducing features to simultaneously create horizontal and vertical highlight reels and further simplifying content creation for multi-platform distribution.

Balancing Innovation and Accessibility

The AI Game Highlighter represents a leap in content creation technology, but Streamlabs remains committed to ensuring its tools are accessible to novice and experienced streamers.

“Creating content has always been about personalization and letting your unique feel and perspective come through,” Ashray explains. 

The AI Game Highlighter works with Streamlabs’ existing capabilities to create a stream and content unique to every streamer, allowing them to customize their content. 

“You’ll still be able to add music of your choice, create your intro and outro, customize transitions that you prefer, and trim the clips within the highlight and video overall,” he notes.

Ashray stresses that personalization remains critical in the age of AI. 

“We don’t think the future is the world where everyone is posting the same video just with their clips,” he says. The tool captures the streamer’s unique overlays and stream setup, ensuring that individual branding is maintained.

To balance innovation with accessibility, Streamlabs strategically integrated the AI Game Highlighter directly into Streamlabs Desktop. 

Ashray explains the rationale: “It’s so nice that when the program is running and powering your stream, it finishes that part. And now the program is at work to produce your highlights.”

This integration simplifies the user experience, particularly for new streamers. 

“You decide you’re going live, and you hit go live. And if Fortnite is the game that you have selected, you’ll see this little pop-up saying, ‘Do you want to generate your AI highlights?’” Ashray says.

Streamlabs aims to reduce friction for new streamers by offering powerful tools focusing on seamless integration and ease of use.

Effortless Content Distribution

Ashray shares that the primary feedback from testers has been overwhelmingly positive, with time-saving capabilities being the most appreciated feature.

He adds that even for those planning more complex editing, “just being able to narrow down to these key moments and have those captured just saves a lot of time.”

The AI Game Highlighter builds upon Streamlabs’ earlier cross-platform tool, Cross Clip. 

“We saw that this was helping creators a ton,” Ashray explains. “But the biggest challenge remained… How do we capture the stream’s most interesting and engaging parts,” which is the gap that the new tool fills.

Notably, the AI Game Highlighter will be freely available to all users and fully integrated into Streamlabs Desktop. It’s not a background process and shouldn’t increase the process Streamlabs Desktop uses on the computer.

While the initial launch focuses on Fortnite, Streamlabs plans to expand to other games, starting with similar battle royale shooters before moving to other genres.

Ashray also reveals plans, including a server-based solution for users who prefer not to use their computer resources and scheduling capabilities for uploads.

“We hope that in the future, this just continues to get easier and easier, where it’s like, ‘Finish your stream and have everything you want to post on all socials ready,’” Ashray concludes.